Scavenger Life Episode 109: Interview with Tom the English Picker, Selling on eBay in the UK

Those of you who have followed us over the past year know that we love to travel. It’s motivated us to figure out how to run a full-time eBay business. We want the freedom to go live in another country for one or two months every year. Doubtful this could easily happen if we worked for other people. In 2013, we lived in Prague and Amsterdam for six weeks. This year, we’re going to go back to the Netherlands for another month or so. We even figured out how to keep successfully selling while away. It’s good to have fun goals.

While we’re traveling, we’re always scavenging. It’s much greater challenge when we’re new to the culture (and language). So we’ve been looking for Scavengers in other countries to share how they Scavenge and sell on eBay.

This week, we talk to Tom the English Picker from the East Midlands in the United Kingdom. He explains the differences between selling online in the US and UK. For instance, British people don’t do yard sales, but they do have “car boot sales” (like our flea markets). Since England is a much older culture, people there seem to have a much different sense of what vintage or antique is. But they also love Americana. We love hearing the differences and similarities. He currently focuses on antiques, jewelry and metals. His eBay store is tomac97.

Ask him any question in the comments below. You ever want to go scavenging in the UK?

Comments

Great piece, guys. As an Englishman who dabbles on eBay it was great to hear the different issues faced by scavengers on both sides of the pond.

I hope you do end up doing a podcast on buying from eBay and then flipping back on eBay, as it's a bit like the retail arbitrage thing in that there are lots of youtube vids that make it look like easy money, but I suspect it's not the case.

Here's an example of my own scavenger successes recently; I work in an open plan office and noticed that another team had put a bunch of boxes in a pile to be collected by the cleaners. Amongst the pile were two empty Apple MacBook Air boxes. One even had the plug and manual still inside. I listed both boxes separately on eBay for £16.99, sold one within a day or two and had an offer on the second one. Made £10+ profit from one box, all from junk about to be thrown out.

We have only resold items we bought on eBay a couple times. Not huge money. But we can see were it could be fun.

Finding items to resell is the easiest part of the whole process for us, so this kind of arbitrage isn't really worth our time. I have heard those stotries of people buying items for cheap on eBay, and turns out they were expensive antiques. All depends where you want to put your limited time.

I do lot of ebay flipping but it's true there isn't a lot of money in it, usually only 2 or 3 times the purchase price.. I primarily buy video-game lots of games or accessories and part them out. For example if I buy a lot for $25 on a good day I can get $75-100, most of the time its right around double unless you're lucky.

I'd like do most of my inventory collecting at thrift stores, but as a college student in a city I don't have the time and most of the good stuff gets bought up long before I get there. So buying and flipping things off ebay just is easier for me

Yeah, flipping video games is something I'm looking at. I've set up a bunch of searches to look for types and price ranges, but I haven't managed to win any at the right prices yet. I'll keep plugging away and see what I can find,

depending on your budget, I'd try not to limit your search on price ranges. $100 for a certain lot might be ridiculous but for another lot might be an amazing deal. I also occasionally do searches for "Newly Listed" and "Buy It Now" so if a great deal gets posted I can snatch it up right away.

I'd be interested to hear from any sellers who also live in Great Britain. I know a couple of you have commented before. Is your scavenging experience similar to Tom's? Wonder if things are different in other parts of the country.

I'm also for the UK. Just started selling full time a week ago. It was great to hear the differences between the UK and the US in your podcast. I'm really enjoying the learning curve even though it is hard work. I'm trying to keep all options open with sourcing stock. I think its clear that the most enjoyable and rewarding way of finding inventory is through scavenging. Keep up the good work with the podcasts guys.

Just as something interesting to check out for Jay and Ryanne and anyone else interested in the UK thrifting culture, here are some British shows I love watching. I live in Canada currently, so I'm hooked on British soaps. But as well as my UK soap vice, I love watching shows about thrifting/picking from the UK. You already know of Antiques Roadshow, which for many of us was our first taste of it. But some others that you can try to pick up on You Tube are Cash in the Attic, Bargain Hunt, and the UK's answer to American Pickers is Salvage Hunter. I really enjoy that one.

Also, if you haven't gotten enough, I encourage you to check out some of Canada's shows as well, such as Lost and Sold, The Liquidator, and Canadian Pickers.

These are all good programs and worth checking out if you can get them on You Tube. I learn something with every show I watch. It's great research.

I don't know if this helps, but I am a college student from out of state and still sell items when I go back home for the weekends. I have both my home and school address on my paypal as a registered address so when I ship I just change my address to wherever I am from a drop down menu.

So I don't see why you wouldn't be able change your shipping address easily

She travels around in her RV and sells from the road. If someone wants to return an item, she just gives them a full refund since it's too difficult to keep changing her address. We've thought about selling on our travels. Might be an interesting experiment.

Since I use a spreadsheet for all of my items, I can list no matter where I am. I can't take my inventory with me, obviously, but I can list, I can answer questions and be a mobile business. I keep a copy of everything including photos on an SD card. Pop it into my laptop and list away!

One of my favorite sweaters is a yellow sweater I bought in England in Stratford-Upon-Avon in a thrift store. I got caught in the rain without an umbrella or a jacket. You would think after being there for almost 3 weeks I would have learned my lesson – never go out without a jacket or umbrella. I don't remember what I paid for the sweater, maybe 2-4 pounds. It kept me warm the rest of my trip and I still have it.

I'd love to hear more about how you travel and still keep your Ebay store open. We'll be going to Germany in about 2 years so I can have a specialized surgery there. We'd be gone about 8 weeks, give or take. I'd love to hear more about the steps you take before you leave and what you say to customers when they make a purchase.

We sell online in the UK. We started buying bulk cheap items from China for the first 8 months or so and then re-invested the money in buying items locally for resale online for the last 5 months. We sell quite a wide variety of items, pretty much anything I think we could make a profit on. Store seems to be growing by about 50 items per month and we are currently on 350 items with a about 150-200 sales per month.

We decided to try out some car boots after reading your blog a few months back didnt really buy anything, but on the way out one of the guys just shouted that everything was free on his stall. Most people where rummaging through the boxes of DVDs – we picked up a box of old chocolate memorabilia (mugs, toys, badges, keyrings etc) which he kindly let us take the lot as nobody was interested. We've sold around half so far and made about £150 from it.

As with most people, for us the biggest problem is listing. My partner is a stay at home mum looking after 2 little ones, so she lists a few bits through the day. I work full time so we both list/package at night. That said we are managing to increase stock levels month on month, so at least we are going in the right direction.

There are some things that you sell that I just wouldn't have seen the value in, for example the desk tidy. I guess that's why I like your blog and looking through your shop as it helps me get an idea for things to look out for.

Tom says that eBay have removed the "good till cancelled", this is incorrect as we use it on a few of our items. We used to use it on everything, but decided that by using 30 day listings we got more benefits (newly listed, impulse buys within the last few days, gives us the opportunity to correct/amend listings and prices).

@Lee above – We recycle a lot of boxes/packaging. Anything we get in the post or that we buy that comes in a box, we keep the boxes and use them for sending things out. Often we will need to cut boxes down etc, so we do buy quite a bit of tape/bubble wrap/jiffy bags – all from eBay or Amazon.

Thanks for the story. So are you mostly buying wholesale items from China/England? Items that you can list and then keep in stock by just ordering more ("Replenishables")?

I've always wondered how profitable this is at the end of the day since anyone can buy from the same wholesaler. Ultimately aren't you just competing on price with the other sellers who sell the same thing? Curious what you're actual profit is after all costs are factored in. If you sell 200 items in a month, what is the money that goes into your pocket to pay your mortgage?

Yes, it is weird the older stuff that people buy. But in a world where everything is cheap and made from China, there's a real desire for interesting, rare, well-made items. Much of it could be called "nostalgia".

We started off buying replenishables, just to earn a bit of extra cash after my we had our first baby and lost my partners income, but as you said it all becomes a price war with everyone jumping on each item you sell.

When we were buying stuff from China, we were selling probably 800-1000 items per month (around 50 different items in stock) and only making £1 or so on each item – decent profit (probably £1500/$2500 profit per month) but a lot of work for it and we soon found we ended up having to drop prices (and profit) as other people started stocking items we were selling at lower prices.

We decided it wouldn't last and that we needed to look for something which couldn't be easily replicated, which is when we found eBay Scavengers 🙂

Now I would say that 25% of the items we sell are items that there is nobody else selling the same (or not many anyway).

Another 25% are items which we buy either damaged or heavily used and break them down taking all the good parts and selling them as spares. We bought a pushchair just a few weeks ago for 99p from a local seller on eBay, stripped it down and have so far made about £70 from "parts" off it and still have quite a bit left.

10% is from replenishables that we still have from importing from China.

The remaining 40% is items we buy as joblots and split up, for example we bought about 5 large bin bags of teddy bears, mainly disney/movie characters for £10. All in there is probably 100 teddy bears and every one we have sold so far has been over £10.

Its a real mix and we get our stock from a mix of car boot sales, "for sale" groups on facebook, charity shops and even the odd item from big retailers that are having sales – certain discontinued items go up in value after the retailer stops selling them

The average sale price has gone up from £3-4 when we were importing from China to probably £15-20 now, which has meant our profit is now back up to the same sort of level and is so much more fulfilling. When we got the box of chocolate memorabilia for free while everyone was fighting over DVDs it was such a buzz, like finding a little pot of treasure 🙂

So it sounds as if he floats about $6k-8k of inventory costs on his credit cards to make between $1k-2k of profit. My biggest fear would be having thousands of dollars of unwanted inventory that costs me a lot of money. It really sounds like day trading stocks hoping you can buy low and sell high while the market is moving quickly.

Joblots come from the same sort of places, either people selling off their collections on Facebook, badly advertised "Collection Only" local joblots on ebay, carboot and the odd auction.

China was very very boring. Was great when we started, hearing the "Kerching" every few minutes, but after a while that got boring and instead of thinking "Great another sale!", it became more like "Another item to package".

Having that amount of money on a credit card would scare the hell out of me. I do buy a few bits, but only when heavily reduced/discontinued and I know there is a profit to be had.

I would be worrying all the time about having $6-8 of "debt". Too many variables for me – what if he has a month where he doesn't sell enough to cover the card, gets dropped from the FBA program for some reason, etc, etc. I guess having a family to support and mortgage to pay I like to know that I can quit at any time and not owe anything, all the stock I hold is paid for out of profit from previous sales so doesn't owe me anything. It could sit there for a year or 2 waiting to sell and wouldn't worry me.